USING VIRTUAL FIELD SITES AS A TOOL FOR INVESTIGATING DIFFERENCES IN EXPERT AND NOVICE GEOCOGNITION

The development of virtual field environments can provide insight into how novices and experts observe, visualize, and solve problems in field situations. During the spring and summer of 2010, I interviewed 85 community college students, professional geoscientists, and middle school earth science teachers about a single viewpoint from a virtual field environment. The site is digital panorama of a location on Mt. Hood, Oregon, a heavily glaciated stratovolcano in the Oregon Cascades. Each interviewee was asked to select four physical features in the scene that were of interest to them. After making their selections, they were asked to explain why they selected each feature, and to provide a question about it that is either something they want to know or something that they would ask of a student about it. Each interviewee was instructed to imagine that they were in the scene standing on a ridge with a group of people on a geology field trip.

Interviewee responses were analyzed to determine the following:

• The features that were selected by each group (students, geoscientists, and teachers) and the frequency with which they were selected.
• The questions asked about each feature by members of each group. Each question was ranked according character, cognitive level, and type. The statistics of these rankings were compared across groups.

Preliminary analysis of these responses revealed that while the frequency of the selected “features of interest” was similar across the groups, geologists were more likely to ask process-oriented questions about these features than either students or teachers. Likewise they were more likely to ask questions with multiple answers (divergent), while teachers and students were more likely to ask questions with single “right” answers (directed).